


A John & David

by Wreybies



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood and Gore, Cannibalism, M/M, Post-Zombie Apocalypse, Trope Subversion/Inversion, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:08:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24946627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wreybies/pseuds/Wreybies
Summary: Here we are in the Z.A., and not a damned thing is remotely what we thought it would be.Rated "M" for language and trope-typical violence, blood, and gore. No smut.
Relationships: John/David
Comments: 12
Kudos: 15





	A John & David

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Raiven_Raine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raiven_Raine/gifts).



There is no "safe zone" up north or anywhere else for that matter. Mila Jovovich will not be coming to your rescue trailing her crew of fashion magazine ass-kickers all sporting five hundred dollar hair and apocalypse gear by Diesel. And you can forget about Michonne and her katana.

Fucking Hollywood, man.

The only part they got remotely right was how quickly everything ground to a halt. Less than a month, hastened by some tactical nukes detonated somewhere near the Great Lakes by politicians hoping for a quick fix or at least to turn the tide or score a few more votes. The tide turned all right. Against us. We are jaw-droppingly stupid when we get scared, committed to a pattern of trying to kill something to make it stop because that's what we do - we kill. I mean, we _knew_ they were dead, but there we were trying to kill them anyway because everything looks like nails to a bag of hammers.

I genuinely hope the raccoons make better overlords than we did.

David worries a femur bone that gave up its last scrap of flesh days ago. He used to be my husband. He still is, I guess, but I can't imagine anyone calling this a marriage.

His eyes are unfocused, lost in the absentminded gnawing. They are the only part of him I recognize anymore, so large and crystalline blue. They're worth envying, so it only seems fitting that they are nearly all that is left of the man to whom I'd said yes when he asked me to marry him.

I've almost forgiven his attempt at suicide. Almost.

This place used to be a plain Jane three-bedroom home in the kind of subdivision that only has four or five different house plans in assorted bland color combinations. Faded pastel pink and sea-foam green tchotchke rot or collect dust on shelves. A Helen & Richard, not a Karen & Kyle.

No photographs anywhere, though. I guess they'd taken them with.

The mewling from the front yard becomes audible again. I look out the small, carefully clean spot in the living room window. Someone had sloppily painted it at some point. It wasn't us. Large gobs of dry paint crust the carpet in front of the window. The man staked down in the front yard had looked as fit as anyone does these days when we nabbed him. Desperation makes people just as stupid as fear does. We'd offered him food and made him promise not to hurt us or make us sorry for helping him. We'd held hands as we spoke, playing up the image of two harmless little gay guys. They fall for it almost every time, particularly the men.

It's hard to tell how old people are these days. _Rode hard and put up wet_ is the new permanent look for every season and most of us are now skeletal runway models who don't need to purge. The man could have been thirty or fifty. Physically restraining him had been depressingly easy. David had seemed to relish it, tying his hands behind his back, ignoring the complaints that his fingers were going numb.

He wasn't going to need them much longer.

There haven't been many dead ones lately. Another thing movies got wrong. Dead bodies in the habit of still walking around fall apart rather quickly. After a bit they sag, and once their legs give way - which is just a few days after they turn - that's the end of that.

It's the newly dead that'll get you. At one point, in the very first days, someone on the news had said the infection is like Ebola. It's bad at its job. One gets infected and immediately goes for whomever they can get their hands on, but if no one is around, it burns out quickly. That was how we would beat it, they said. That should have been enough. Too bad you can't really tell people what to do anymore. If they'd listened, maybe this would be a different kind of story.

"Anything?" David asks, the head of the femur still partially held between his lips.

"Just the guy," I say.

I slump back to the floor. David was beautiful once. Not like "he's special to _me_ " beautiful, but genuinely, distractingly beautiful. The kind of pretty that occasionally caused awkward moments when someone realized they'd been staring. Those eyes under brows like eagle's wings are all that’s left. Blue-black hair that had been smooth and crisply tailored was now just hanks of drab randomness.

I'm sure I look worse. I don't have David's initial head start. We'd met at Cornell and had the kind of relationship where people debated as to whether I had money or a horse cock. I hadn't been poor and I'd never had any complaints, but no, it wasn't money or ridiculous accoutrement. He'd been lightyears out of my league so I'd never made any attempts at trying to interest him when our respective circle of friends overlapped. And _that's_ what had interested him. My days in the anthropology department among the dreadlocks and patchouli crowd were numbered. David was taking finance. I followed shortly to the poorly-restrained delight of my parents. No one would ever care how hard I'd worked at keeping Mayan and Aztec mythology separate. I would never go to Chichen Itza or Copán. I would never make rubbings of Mayan hieroglyphs or see the famed ballcourts.

Later, David and I worked together. We stayed in Ithaca. It’s quiet and pretty. It was.

The office threw us a party when we announced our engagement, our coworkers renewing their sense of progressiveness. "Heck yeah, I was at John & David's party. Wouldn't'a missed it," they would say afterward, tallying up their diversity points to calculate just how much self-licensing they'd accrued. We were the kind of gays that were easy for certain folk to like, all buttoned up and as conservative as a hedgerow trimmed to geometric perfection.

Today David is just those eyes and dirty hair and that stupid bone he keeps chewing.

The mewling becomes a low, exhausted wail.

David drops his bone and looks out the peephole in the glass.

"One's coming," he says, his voice tight with anticipation. His smile is feral. His eyes blaze actinic. He's been gnawing that dry bone too long.

I bring a finger to my lips to shush him and take his place at the window.

She shuffles out from between two houses. A young woman, or so she'd been. Perhaps that had been her house where she stands now in the overgrown lawn sniffing the air. She looks convincingly suburban beneath the decay and rot.

Her left knee is about done. She holds it in place with her hand to keep it from kicking out and folding in a direction it was never meant to. Funny that she has the presence of mind to do that. They usually just scramble, pieces of them falling off, collapsing into a pile of random limbs that no longer function.

The man staked to the grass lifts his head at the sound of her shuffling. He stares for a moment and then makes his last bid to escape. When death looms, terrible reserves of energy make themselves known, but they are final reserves. There is no winning, just the cold sickening dump of adrenaline prickling painfully along one's back and shoulders.

I know that feeling.

He flails desperately. Spittle sprays into the air every time he cries and screams. The first time we did this had been gut-wrenching. You don't watch a man behave like a trapped animal about to die and not feel something. It got easier after that. Never easy, but easier.

David had taken to it more quickly. He stakes them into the ground now. We'd tried other ways. Tying them up, crippling them. Staking them down is the best way.

"She's nearly across the street. Got a bad leg. You ready?" I ask. A clipped nod is his only response. The grease on his face becomes extra shiny with sweat. I gesture him to the front door.

The man stops flailing and watches her approach. Maybe he's thankful. Maybe it's not a good idea to think about his thoughts. His chest rises and falls in deep protracted breaths. She tries to kneel next to him but ends up sitting heavily on one thigh when her bad leg takes the last step it ever will.

They don't savage you. Probably the biggest thing the movies got wrong. They lick you. If they can, they drool on you copiously. They kiss you. Their bloated tongues want inside your mouth or nose or eyes. Anywhere the infection is sure to take. They only bite when you struggle, mostly to hold on to you. Otherwise, the dead are surprisingly gentle.

Had he known her? We'd found him a couple of streets over. It's possible. And it doesn't really matter.

She leans over him, tender as a virgin with a unicorn, her purple tongue, swollen and stiff, outlining his lips. The man tries to push his head back into the lawn, into the earth, anything to get away from his deadly admirer.

She continues her ministrations. The man can do nothing through the final panic. David has secured both hands and feet to the lawn. His whimpers grow quiet and fade. Nothing happens for a minute. His chest no longer rises.

"Go," I say to David.

He's out the door with a metal table leg in his hands. The girl looks up at him, her tongue darts out, another lover to seduce. But if she didn't stand a chance before all this, she certainly doesn't have any hope now. Her milky dead eyes scan his face for a moment before the table leg swings with all the strength David can muster. His blood is up and the strike is true. She falls sideways, half her skull gone.

She'd been deader than she looked. What comes from her head is black. Strange. They don’t usually last that long.

I go to the door, scan up and down the street, then rush out to where David stands next to the broken dead woman and the freshly dead man.

He'll turn soon. I don't pretend to understand what's in play, the processes. All I know is that we have to get the man's head away from his body as soon as we can; else, it goes sour.

I'm fucking starving.

I have a knife with me. David took care of the girl; my job is to butcher. The knife is strapped to my leg. It's not very efficient. I look just to the side of what I'm doing, not directly at it. It's a stupid trick, but doing it allows me to pretend that I'm not hunting for this man's _foramen magnum_ with the tip of a knife. The things you remember from freshman anthropology. It's a large knife. It's not easy but I get it done.

I don't even gag anymore. Did I mention that I used to be a financial consultant? I used to help people plan their retirement. I was the placid voice on the other end of the phone with the carefully curated flat midwestern accent explaining why, at this point in your life, Mrs. Smith or Mr. Jones, you might want to consider a more conservative portfolio.

Now we're this.

The head comes away and stops looking like a head. I can't really explain why that is. You have to see it to understand. It just looks different.

The blood is still red. It's as fresh as it gets. We need to go.

"Come on," I say. We duck back into the house with the head. We strip out of clothing covered in gore. I put the head in a trash bag, careful not to let any blood get on the outside, tie it up, and put it in a second trash bag and tie that one up too.

"Gimme' your hands," says David. He pours most of a bottle of peroxide on them making bloody foam. I rinse it off with water we pulled from the green pool in the backyard using a bucket from the garage. He pours the rest of the peroxide and there's almost no foam. I rinse again.

"Let's just go upstairs," says David.

"No," I say in my _fuck no_ voice.

There's a freshly dead body outside along with another one well past its sell-by date, a severed head inside, and all the racket that came before, during, and after.

Pronouncing each word as a separate sentence, I say, ”We need to go. Don't get stupid.”

I never talked like this to him before. I had been too mesmerized by his beauty. Too insecure. Too sure he would wake up and realize what a huge mistake he'd made picking me. That's mostly gone now. So much of his life before had been conveniently prepackaged for pretty people, on automatic. Everything is manual now and if you don't have a talent for driving stick, you will crash.

There's nothing for us to fear from the dead at this point. The living are infinitely more dangerous.

We have to go.

Clean clothes aren't hard to come by. Closets are graveyards where we bury clothing as a ritual sacrifice with the tags still on them. Buy a shirt, stick it in a drawer, never wear it, throw it away when whatever made you buy it fades. Capitalism was a bigger death cult than the Egyptians could ever imagine with their mummified falcons and baboons.

I shrug into clothes I would never have looked at a year ago. I'm just happy they're clean and they fit.

David pulls on a tee shirt and jeans, looking like an ancient homeless frat boy. No _freshman fifteen_ these days.

I grab the bag and make for the back door, around the pool that's become a pond complete with frogs, and out the gate in the back fence. We scramble through some landscaping gone wild and into another backyard. House, street, house, backyard, backyard, house, street, house. I lose track of how many. They're all the same little worker ant houses in worker ant _cul de sacs_.

Suburbia is a hive.

We go through a garage that's been left open, into a hall, into a small ransacked kitchen that goes nowhere, back into the hall and into the living room. This house is the global epicenter of beige, brown, and all points in between. The kitchen had stalled out sometime in the harvest gold 70's. The carpet is taupe, the sofa a lighter shade of muslin only a hair darker than the wall behind it. It is the opposite of a house. An anti-house. No one ever lived here. They only occupied it, doing their best to leave it unmarked by any trace of personality in order to pass it on to someone else, hopefully making a little money on the sale, but live here? No. No one had lived here. Not in the real sense of the word. A single-family hotel.

It's a good house for what we want. It's invisible to both the living and the dead. Small, claustrophobic, uninteresting. We leave the front door and the garage open. Closing them would hint at someone hiding inside. We've learned from our past mistakes.

We go upstairs and pick a room. Not a bedroom. Beds remind me of everything my relationship with David no longer is. There's a very old tan computer with a CRT monitor under a blanket of dust. They might have called this an office, this little not-office in this anti-house in this most generically forgettable cookie-cutter worker ant subdivision. Maybe it was just where they put things they weren't using. Shelves, a couple of mismatched chairs, and this little computer on an old hutch. If this were the mid-nineties, this might have been a fun room with loud colorful games on the screen. But it's not.

The linen closet in the hall gives up some folded sheets. We open and lay several of them on the floor, overlapping them heavily to cover the choking dust the carpet has consumed over the past year.

"I'll do it," I say to David when the sheets are down. I take the bag with the head to the little upstairs bathroom and put it in the tub. With two heavy swings of the toilet tank lid, the skull breaks.

David sits cross-legged waiting for me in the sad little not-office. A string of spittle stretches from his chin.

It had started the day David tried to kill himself.

We'd hid in a strip mall in what had been a women's boutique. A collapsed pile of dead person shifted horribly between two racks of purses like she'd been shopping for a clutch and suddenly fell apart. Her legs were useless and she'd crawled her arms into the same state. Just her tongue searching for its next victim. David had been crying uncontrollably. He was broken. Not physically, but, well... you know. And I had no idea how to fix him, but I couldn't stop dragging him around. He'd been my Radio Flyer red wagon, my bicycle with tassels on the handlebars, my enviable gaming system. Our old lives had been defined by what we had, and I had him, and that was what defined me and despite the pile of dead person between the purses, I didn't know how to let go of that.

I sat behind the cash register counter while he smashed what was left of her with a metal shirt rack.

When he was done screaming, he cried some more. Then came silence. Then the unmistakable sound of chewing.

He was eating her brain, which was now well outside its original packaging. You might not call that an attempt at suicide, but if not, please tell me what you would call the intentional eating of zombie brains.

I’d curled back into a ball behind the register, my diaphragm doing its best to create a singularity, pinching down, compressing.

I don't remember falling asleep or maybe I had just hyperventilated myself unconscious, but sometime later David woke me up, his face a nightmare of gore and blood, none of it his.

He told me a strange story, and that's how it started. It's why we don't worry about the dead. They don't notice us anymore. We walk by them, they sniff, stick out their tongues, and move on.

David was a little less broken after that, and I was a little more.

I bring the head back to the room, open the outer bag carefully and the inner bag less carefully. There's still some butchering to do. I cut and cut and pry and cut.

David doesn't wait for me to finish. He grabs and pries it open at the temple.

Raw brains are exactly as disgusting to eat as you might expect, but only for a moment. See, dead brains don’t make you into a zombie, and given all the unprotected butchering, I’m pretty sure they keep you from becoming one and, holy fuck, do they get you high. Higher than anything I'd ever tried at college. And not just _any_ dead brains. We'd tried that too, a living person we killed outright. Doesn't work. It has to be after they're taken. The sooner you get the head off, the more it fucks you up.

My advice is that it’s better if you're sitting and best if you're lying down. You don't get too much choice as to how you land once you're committed.

I bite. I chew. I lay back. I swallow. I leave.

The sheets we have spread on the floor rise to meet me. They are angel wings, a mother's bosom, a shroud in which to ascend to Heaven or sink down to Xibalbá.

Today I think it will be Xibalbá. I will play the ballgame with Hun-Camé and we will boast of a million sacrifices in the great ballcourt.


End file.
